Abandoned by Booklikes

Wow. This story took several hundred pages to even get going. I figured out a ton of things before anyone else did.

We once again get Poirot in this novel at around the 80 percent mark. I have seen it before, and will say it again. The Poirot books are boring when we focus too much on other people.

I wish that we had Poirot involved from the beginning so at least he didn't come in as a side character. The main character in this book from beginning to end was Julia Upjohn. Since this book was published in 1959, once again we get some comments about changing times. And you can read at times at how old/odd Poirot is to other people. I often read that Agatha Christie disliked Poirot as a character as she got older. I can definitely see that in her later works.

The overall plot really didn't work for me at all. Reading about a mythical Middle Eastern country that is overrun with fanaticism was initially interesting. But to have the whole thing descend into a big conversation on how women get distracted and/or crazy when around jewels I thought was just a bit much. It also didn't help that we had huge plot holes that just baffled me made their way into the final cut. Christie for the most part in my opinion, is much better than this.

The pacing was off a lot. Initially things were quite smooth, after the book moved to England things just slowed down to a ridiculous proportion.

The setting of a girls school I thought was an interesting choice, I just wish that we had actually gotten to know more of the instructors/students by more than a throwaway line here and there. It lead to just a lot of confusion with such a huge cast of characters.